X marks the spot

Pirate scholarship approaches the problem of buried treasure with a dour mien, as I discovered while reading for my New Yorkerreview-essay "Bootylicious." Here's Patrick Pringle, representatively dispiriting:

Presumably people believe in pirate treasure because they want to. There is no other reason for the belief. Pirates did not bury their treasure. They shared out their loot as they got it. This hardly needs to be explained. The pirates did not trust one another sufficiently to leave the plunder in a common hoard once they left the ship. Besides, each man wanted to use his share, either to invest in a business or, more generally, to spend.

Pirates facing execution sometimes hinted that they had stashed something away for a rainy day, but historians for the most part suspect them of fibbing in order to encourage the greedy to spare their lives. Are we to deprived of all our illusions? At most, the skeptical Pringle concedes that the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp once mistook a large quantity of silver for tin and heaved it overboard, only to regret the error afterward. Perhaps that silver remains undisturbed.